Interview of author Amitav Ghosh

DM: Please share your thoughts on the idea of reincarnation

AG: I think rather than “reincarnation” I would use the phrase “past life memories” because that is what it really is.

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DM: Do you have any personal experience of it?

AG: I cannot really claim that I have past life memories but I have friends who do have past life memories. I think all of us know someone or another who has past life memories. And especially now, after writing this book, many people are telling me that they have past life memories, which I didn’t know about earlier.

DM: The Dhakuria Lakes is part of the setting of this novel and clearly plays a role in evoking the experiences of a past life.

AG: My Mama’r bari (mother’s childhood home) is there, right next to the Dhakuria Lake. That was the center of my life in Calcutta. So I remember the Dhakuria Lake. It was very much a part of my childhood. I spent a lot of time there. So it is very deeply embedded in my memory.

DM: The Sunderban has been considered as a source of renewable energy with its abundance of sunlight, water and wind as we transition to green energy. Could you share your thoughts on this?

AG: Houses in the Sunderbans can certainly use solar panels. Solar panels can be very useful. But you know I remember the Sunderban when there was nothing, no electricity, nothing. Even the Goshaba was one of the first electrified towns in India. Sir Daniel Hamilton electrified the town. I do think it is very important to make energy available to the villagers. Solar panels can do that very well.

DM: When was the last time you went to the Sunderban?

AG: I went to the Sunderban last year at this time. I found that several places that I went to were using solar panels. A fair number but I have to say that it came as a great shock to me when I went there last year because there was so much tourism and there were so many boats going constantly up and down and these boats have all their lights on and also they play a lot of loud music and there is enormous noise. And I was thinking ‘how do the poor animals manage in the midst of all this racket?’. And it makes you wonder how do they….how can any kind of wildlife survive in the middle of this cacophony? And also I think the tourists who go there are often not at all attuned to the environment. And so they throw plastic bags and other trash into the rivers, into the water. It’s actually terrible…. though I should not really complain because my book has drawn a lot of people to the Sunderban.

DM: Why did you decide on a fisherwoman and not someone else as the past self?

AG: I wanted to write about someone who has a very detailed knowledge about the environment. Not like scientific knowledge but empirical knowledge. So I wanted to write about that and of course I have known many people in the Sunderban who are like that. Just ordinary women, men who interact with the environment and therefore have a very good understanding of it. And I wanted to think about how that kind of understanding defers both from the scientific understanding of the environment as well as from the urban perspective.
The strange thing about past life memories is that you don’t have to have the past life memories yourself. Actually since my book came out, several people have told me about these peculiar situations where a child who they don’t know recognizes them. It happened to a friend of mine. She was in Kolkata and she went to visit someone and there was a child there whom she didn’t know but the child immediately looked at her and said, “I know you, why did you go away so suddenly without letting any of us know?” And this child who was like three or four, just kept coming back to her and saying, “Why did you leave? Why did you leave?”

And she had no knowledge at all of this child and yet the child kept clinging her.
Another very famous anthropologist called Akhil Gupta wrote an article (he was at Stanford and now he is a professor at UCLA) in which he described a similar thing….he describes a Rajasthani village where a little girl came up to him and kept saying, “Bobby, where did you go and why didn’t I see you in so long?”
So it is not that you have to remember yourself. I find it very interesting. You may not know that you had a past life but someone else does.

DM: Have you ever felt like going back in time and remembering your past life? I mean they have these past life regression therapies in psychiatry…..

AG: No, never.

DM: Where does the empathy come from?

AG: You know for me I sense that the world is a very mysterious place. Not that I necessarily want to delve into those mysteries because I am scared of them.